Tag: public engagement

This was the catchily provocative title of the BBC News article that riled me up this morning.

What really angers me about this whole article is the tone of the debate. The two ‘balanced’ opinions on this are PETA, a charity with a very dubious history, and a chap who sells vegan pet food. Also, some person on Twitter.

The BBC, and other journalists, are forever reaching out to scientists to curate a list of experts. This blog arose from a great workshop by Voice of Young Science a few years ago, where a journalist was talking about how much they relied on blogs to find experts on subjects. Public engagement is a lot of fun, but I know that it is hard to always effectively engage with the right stakeholders. In fact, I blogged about the academic’s responsibility in this area a few years ago.

This article is about things that ‘trend’, and so PETA and the industry trended higher than the science. I’m not absolving the journalist of their responsibility, I know for a fact the BBC have my name, and others’ names on their list of people who are willing to talk about animals from an informed standpoint. But it’s hard for a single scientist, even a group of scientists, to make enough noise about what they do.

So, as a scientist who makes noise, do I think it’s cruel to keep a fennec fox on a vegan diet?

Yes I do. We could debate the finer details of exotic pet-keeping, the challenge of applying binary categories such as ‘cruel’ or ‘good’ to the existence of life, or the difficulty of incorporating ‘natural’ into animal welfare assessment – but the key to public engagement is answering questions, without misleading someone about what’s really going on. And it is hard. It’s hard as a scientist to come up with an opinion, because we know we don’t know everything. We need to get better at providing opinions along with our knowledge, and encouraging people to critique those opinions. We need to get better at the BBC soundbite.

So here’s my best effort, if the BBC had decided to consult an actual scientist.

It is extremely difficult to meet the social, nutritional and environmental needs of a fox. They are intelligent animals, and evolution has made them extremely well suited for the environments they’re found in. Unlike cats, who come from similar environments, they were not able to make use of humans and domesticate themselves. Restricting a fennec fox’s diet to vegan food only is an additional stress that I would expect would be very harmful for an animal that is already physiologically and mentally stressed by being kept as a pet. In my opinion it is cruel to keep a fennec fox as a pet, and on a vegan diet.

Dr Jill MacKay, Researcher at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies

If, like me, this question makes you mimic a quizzical puppy – imagine sitting in one of the beautiful meeting rooms in the Scottish Parliament while this is Q.1 in our pop quiz introduction to the Academic Engagement with Parliament workshop.

Thankfully none of the other scientists were leaping up in their chairs to answer either!

Yesterday I had the very good fortune to attend a brilliant workshop run by SPICe (a part of Scottish Parliament responsible for research briefings and information). The aim of the workshop was to get academics engaging more with the parliament and the policy making process.

The answer, by the way, is that the government runs the country and the parliament serves the country by holding the government to account. It’s a remarkably simple answer that I hope was buried somewhere in the back of my brain but just an example of one of the ways I realised how poor I am at policy-engagement!

A grand day out at the Scottish Parliament

One of my big take home messages from yesterday was that Parliament does desperately want to engage with us, but we academics tend to wait in our ivory tower for somebody to come calling at its base. I often accuse the public of not seeking out scientific information when they have a question so imagine my shame (In Glaswegian parlance: it gie me a right riddie) when I realised I’m just as guilty of this when it comes to engaging with policy.

Transparency is important for the Scottish Parliament and their Bills are all available at each stage, with many calls for feedback throughout the process. The government also declares its plan for the year and any bills it will propose at regular intervals (usually September). Why do I never check this to see if there’s anything our team should be feeding into?

The legislative process in the Scottish Parliament – actually very simple!

And it’s impossible to visit the Scottish Parliament without talking about how beautiful it is. It’s a truly amazing building, designed to reinforce the ideals of transparency and accountability for the people.

Whether quirk of architectural psychology or just the joy of having actually learned something, I came away from yesterday feeling inspired and enthusiastic about policy in a way I haven’t felt since my PhD days.

Like this:

The last couple of posts have been pretty heavy and I love how much you guys have engaged with them. The discussion has been fabulous and really gratifying.

But this week I want to change gears a little and do something lighthearted. As you know I’m a bit of a geek and a gamer. I also love public engagement. Luckily enough these two things share some common ground in educational games! Wait, wait, wait! Don’t run away! Educational games can be fun!

Seriously though – Minnesota Zoo put together a great one on grey wolf behaviour called Wolf Quest. You can download it for free at that link and I’ve put together a demonstration Let’s Play for your viewing pleasure:

What I really love about Wolf Quest is that they actually tested how effective the game is at teaching. Schaller et al (2009) found that after playing the game, users knew more about wolf behaviour than they did before. Yay! Learning! This is due entirely to the amount of work that went into creating the game. For a game that’s A) Free and B) Educational and C) A good few years old now, it looks pretty good. I’ve played worse! In the evaluation the game’s creators note that they specifically wanted to engage younger users which results in this hilarious quote when they discuss the attention their game received:

Clearly, we had succeeded in reaching youth on their home territory.

And after all, isn’t that what public engagement is all about?

If you want to know more about how wolf reintroduction has affected Yellowstone (I checked, Amethyst Mountain is totally a place) check out this video which starts with some lovely shots of wolves howling.

I’m planning a few more traditional posts for next week. There’s the tail docking ban in Scotland’s working dogs which definitely needs discussing, and of course the fake papers problem, but let me know if you’d like to see some occasional ‘fluff’ (forgive the pun) pieces like this.